The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing by Andrea Warner
The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing
by Andrea Warner
ECW Press, 2024; 136 pages; $19.95
Reviewed by Gerilee McBride
“That was the summer of 1963 — when everybody called me Baby, and it didn’t occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn’t wait to join the Peace Corps, and I thought I’d never find a guy as great as my dad. That was the summer we went to Kellerman’s.” As film intros go it’s as iconic as it gets. This is the story of Baby and Johnny and how two very different people can come together to solve the world’s problems through dance. or at least the world of Kellerman’s resort that they inhabit for a short, exceedingly intense, dance-filled two weeks.
ECW’s latest title in its pop classics series, The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing by Andrea Warner, is a slice of the sweetest watermelon you’ve ever tasted (or have carried to a sweaty dance party). Offering a first-person narrative of her world-changing experience upon encountering the 1987 film Dirty Dancing at the tender age of nine, Warner invites us to witness the ways in which the summer romance’s major themes of feminism, women’s reproductive rights, and music, shaped her life going forward.
Most of the chapters are introduced with the song titles from the film’s soundtrack and offer up bite-sized essays that can be read almost as quickly as it takes to listen to that particular track. This is a very satisfying throughline. The music is integral to setting the tone for each scene, and subsequently, each scene is immediately identifiable by the song that’s playing. (Chapter three is devoted entirely to the film’s soundtrack for this very reason.) Earlier chapters outline screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein’s difficulty getting her film past development, along with social, political, and racial analysis that address what was happening in the ’80s, as well as a discussion centering underlying biases and the appropriation of Black culture, that, in 2024, is integral to any survey.
As many times as I’ve watched Dirty Dancing (repeatedly, unabashedly) I’ve never fully appreciated, or recognized, how much of a feminist picture it was drawing. I know that I was first drawn to the film because I was the kind of kid growing up that would have LoVED to go to Kellerman’s and partake in all its anachronistic offerings — learn to mambo with a group of seniors? Check. put together a puzzle in my cozy cabin while it rains outside? Check. Try on wigs at the beach?! Check, check, check! I was also into female heroines, old music, and, if I’m being totally honest, I wanted to be a version of Patrick Swayze’s Johnny — the working-class, leather jacket-wearing, and aloof cool guy. But it’s Baby’s story that Warner makes the case for and it’s her transformation that gives the film (and Warner’s thesis) so much weight. Idealistic Baby has her core beliefs shattered when she becomes first-hand acquainted with social inequity, privy to an unsafe abortion, and especially when she lets down her beloved dad. We see her rise to each challenge, despite being afraid, and become a fuller, more complex character. by the time she nails “the lift,” Baby is sure of who she is and how she would like to be in the world. Warner captures this coming-of-age tale in a way that is true to the pop classics series premise — to offer intelligent but accessible arguments about why a particular pop phenomenon matters. The importance of making space for “feminist-centered creativity” and having that viewpoint explored through the female gaze is the firm foundation that Warner has built her case on as to why Dirty Dancing has reached such heights of popularity. And why it still continues to matter almost forty years later.
In a way, this small tome acts as a kind of field guide companion, taking you back in time to not only the 1960s era of the film, but also running parallel to Warner’s experience of the film from the late 1980s onward. It’s a little time machine that runs on 45s, dancing, and summer love. A pink covered pocket jewel begging, ‘Be My Baby’.